The Technician Quotes

“Mysticism is the function of a mind looking for alternatives to reality.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“Why do I get the feeling, interjected Cheops, that shit and fan are moving into conjunction, and that we might be in the way?”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“When resurrection and actual corporeal immortality are real facts of life, the threats and promises of old-style organized religions become laughable. When education is taken out of the hands of the doctrinaires, religion is castrated at source. With knowledge and experience able to bypass the senses and be loaded directly to the Human mind, the standard level of Human intelligence rises, and religion wilts under its inspection, for religion thrives on ignorance. But when religion crawls away from the light of reasoned inspection it sheds its damaged skin and returns with something thicker and more durable. When science explains the universe, and gets everything right, century after century, one would think that religion should turn into the quaint pursuit of the intentionally deluded, or be a matter for historians. However, the virus that is religion is a difficult one to kill. Over the years it has mutated and adapted to changes in its environment. It turns holy writ into allegory, turns true stories into parables, styles angels as metaphors, admits to embarrassment at demons. It tries to downplay its gods and concentrate on the good it perceives in itself, like the comfort it offers to the faithful, for surely comfort can be found in the knowledge that if you infringe on arbitrary rules written down thousands of years ago you will burn in hell for ever.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician: Polity 4

“Repetition never does any harm, whilst a failure to understand might,’ the drone replied. ‘Yes, quite.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“Grant realized that he too had once had his own set ideas about such things and, as he had discovered, a lot of ideas failed to survive their first contact with reality.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“And the time had returned at last when a gorgeous painting taking weeks of skill to produce might garner more praise than a frozen pig’s penis in a glass of vodka.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“We could make you believe Zelda Smythe is a transsexual orangutan living on bananas on Mars.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“I think, Shree, that you’ve lost sight of what we were fighting for.’ ‘I haven’t, it’s freedom.’ ‘An airy concept often used by people who are really saying: I’m fighting for the freedom to tell you what to do.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“Amistad found Chanter amusing: one of those borderline cases whose low-order autism balanced out his sociopathy, so that rather than being antisocial he was asocial.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“But then, this inability to accept that the cheaper version of a food or drink is absolutely no different from the expensive version, has a long and well documented history.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“but to do so would be to lapse into the kind of conspiracy theory that Humans, who did not really understand statistics, tended to lapse into. It was coincidence, just that.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“Art is just another way to describe and classify reality – its mystical aspects merely a function of ignorance.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician

“However, some cannot live without their war and are unable to give up their hate. They are matured by conflict and cannot define themselves other than by what they fought. They consider themselves the polar opposite to their enemy, the antithesis of their enemy. They are the white hats whilst the enemy are the black hats. Their problem is that they cannot visualize a world without hats – and fail to see that the ugly processes of war ironed out those distinctions. And worse still, even when there are no black hats left, they seek others they deem suitable for that attire, because in the end it is not the enemy that matters, but the hate.”
― Neal Asher, The Technician